Mikhail Subbotin

Mikhail Fedorovich Subbotin (Russian: Михаил Фёдорович Субботин, 29 June 1893 – 26 December 1966) was a Soviet mathematician and astronomer who calculated orbits of planets and comets.

Subbotin stayed in Leningrad and almost starved to death during the siege by the Germans and was finally evacuated in February 1942 to Sverdlovsk to recover.

A memorial plaque was installed at his house at Moskovsky Prospect 206 in 1971 (architect V. V. Isaeva)[5] He started his career working on the theory of functions and probability.

[4] As he moved more to astronomy he concentrated on celestial mechanics to devise new methods to calculate orbits from three observations based on solving the Euler–Lambert equations.

[2][6][7] “... Subbotin not only showed the possibility of improving the convergence of the trigonometric series by which the behaviour of perturbing forces is represented, but also gave an expression for determining Laplace coefficients and presented formulas for computing the coefficients of the necessary members of the trigonometric series.”[4] Subbotin wrote a three-volume work called “Course in Celestial Mechanics" (1933–49), in which for the first time in Russian the main questions of celestial mechanics were described in detail.